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February 2006

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Feb 22, 2006

Evaluating vendors

Andy Hayler has a post on criteria and methods for evaluating vendors and it reminded me of something we used to do (and may still do, I really don't know) for managing the process of evaluating customer requests for new features. The idea was simple, each customer has 100 votes (I don't remember what the exact formula was for determing the number of votes you had) they can use, if they have 100 features they would like they could put in 100 feature requests with 1 vote each, however if they had just 2 feature requests and one was critical and the other a nice-to-have they could put the critical request in with 90 votes and the other in with just 10. The point is that you had 100 votes that you could use in a weighted fashion.

An important thing about using a weighting system like this one is that the weights must add up to 100.The point here is that it forces you to make trade-offs: you can havean extra functional criteria, but you must reduce the existing weightsto make sure that the weights still add to 100. This gives thediscipline to stop everything being" essential".

This is a good methodology for evaluating vendors, products, or any purchase for that matter